171–180 of 190 posts
Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? I thought everything was outsourced to Korea. I know it can build military vessels, but at horribly slow pace. Australia will get their nuclear submarines some time in 2040. I can not imagine building civilian nuclear ice breakers in US.
But Korea is operating at a much, much grander scale and scope. Like having a chain of 7 respectable burger shops vs. McDonalds.
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For those interested in a more analytical approach, this article/youTube video explains how the geographical vulnerability of Russia's western borders has led to both its high degree of overall militarization as well as its extreme sensitivity over Ukraine in particular: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/12/05/caspian_r... ! Although it is usually ignored, geography is fundamental to understanding why nati…
> geographical vulnerability of Russia's western border This is Russia's argument, but it is nonsense. Nobody would attack any Russian border, western or otherwise, because Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons. It's as simple as that.
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The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... and if they wished to survive competitively, they moved their production offshore (helps avoid UAW strikes). Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back? Tariffs? A larger military-industrial complex? Even larger government?
Every large company is itself a "centrally planned economy". I worked for General Motors - it was much more like the Soviet Union than people want to admit. Every conglomerate I have worked for that had more than 10,000 workers was run like dictatorships.
if anything, that "I can just go" leads to more of a cult or prison than a dictatorship.
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Not a huge need, really just Alaska and the Great Lakes. For geostrategic purposes, our friends to the north have something like 20 including a couple heavies.
Interesting. I would have thought that the Great Lakes would be important to keep cleared and necessitate more than 1-2.
and the Great Lakes are Great -- bigger than you'd think, and highly traversed.
Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? I thought everything was outsourced to Korea. I know it can build military vessels, but at horribly slow pace. Australia will get their nuclear submarines some time in 2040. I can not imagine building civilian nuclear ice breakers in US.
> designers, engineers and welders grapple with something the U.S. hasn’t done in decades: reliably shape hardened steel that is more than an inch thick into a curved, reinforced ship’s hull I don't understand. Aren't modern military ships armoured anymore?
At the end of WW2, the Japanese had developed, but not yet deployed, suicide airplanes with 2,900 Kg shaped charges built into them. If they were deployed, and managed to get close enough, it's possible it would have blown right through the 12" armor of an Iowa class battleship. It was Mitsubishi Ki0167[2], according to Ryan Szimanski the curator of the Battleship New Jersey, in this video[1]. This marked the effecti…
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I am Russian and I know what I'm talking about living in that place about corruption and business and institutions. Corruption data with sources: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-rating-of-corrupt... About demographics check these: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aging_of_Russia&u... About education: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pisa-score-of-the-worst-a... Let's not cite "Bloomberg" as a g…
Your “ourwordindata” link shows a net improvement between the two data points. The “demographic crisis” appears to be on par with, if not better than, what the vast majority of Asian and European countries are experiencing. And are you seriously quoting “perceived corruption”? That’s a subjective measure. It’s literally in the title. Could you at least try instead of throwing random links that you probably haven’t ev…
Personally from hiring people and from my brothers 2 businesses there is a stagnation too. The government talks about "reforming" the universities to break with Bologna system with internationally recognized degrees - this won't help either. Additionally along with the reform and with all the sanctions it'll be harder to go to foreign universities for students. And don't forget all the "arrests" of prominent scientists: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/11/27/88134-berut-lyud...
Population is declining and the war won't help with that either. It doesn't matter than in Japan it's worse, we're talking the number of people in active economic age going down. This is not good in the long term, who would work and pay pensions? Oil is a finite resource.
About the corruption, I can tell you many personal stories (tax authorities & fire department are one of the worst ones and if you try to build something without bribes it's impossible to get the paperwork done ), but this would be hearsay, not data. There are 2 global indices and both suffer from subjectivity. You can check the trends for direct foreign investments and capital outflows from Russia, especially after 2015. Russian ministers live like billionaires and fly their dogs to Europe in private jets (check the story of Shuvalov's dogs flights). I'm not aware of such gimmicks in the "morally bankrupt" western countries. You're correct that it's subjective, but it's subjectively better in Sweden and Germany than in Russia or Ukraine. If you can't provide a better metric your argument is even more subjective, because it's not aggregated from many people over the years (the trend should be correct even if the values are not).
So please provide links and data, not your "expectations". And do you live in Russia and have personal experience as I do to have a better subjective perspective?
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> The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate. Why bother with the 'annex' part when you can just overthrow governments you don't like and replace them with ones you do?
Even if that were still being done, it is obvious that the authoritarian states think annexing is very important (again, look at Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Tibet, Yuhigurs, etc.). But, nice try with the false equivalency and whataboutism.
Is it not? Afghanistan in 2002, Iraq in 2002, Haiti in 2004, Libya in 2011, the US is taking sides in the civil wars in Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, and there's whatever happened in Bolivia in 2019.
If those aren't recent enough for you, then it's mildly surprising you'd bring up Chechnya (under Russian (then Soviet, then Russian) control since the mid-19th century, most recent major operations ended in 2009), Tibet (annexed in 1950, previously under varying levels of Chinese control up thru the mid-Qing), and the Uighurs (Xinjiang / the Tarim Basin was first occupied by China as early as the Han dynasty and has been under Chinese control since 1884 (Qing then RoC then PRC)).
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> geographical vulnerability of Russia's western border This is Russia's argument, but it is nonsense. Nobody would attack any Russian border, western or otherwise, because Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons. It's as simple as that.
Given the extremely high cost, why do you think countries with nuclear weapons have conventional military at all?
The US is something of an outlier. Most countries maintain much smaller militaries. They have them on hand for a variety of purposes: disasters, foreign peacekeeping, border patrol, and keeping their hand in Just In Case.
NATO countries, for example, are supposed to keep militaries so that Russia doesn't get any ideas. Say, Wagner troops meander across the border into Poland. Russia clutches its pearls and says, "Oh, no, don't end the entire world by nuking us even though it's obvious that we ordered it." So troops would get sent... which is why it never actually happens.
How much military you need to achieve that is up for debate. The US often claims that other NATO countries need more, and that the European countries are relying on America to provide most of that deterrent. But the US is almost certainly providing way, way, way more deterrent than is needed -- more about national preening than serious consideration of needs.
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You need mass to break ice.
> You need mass to break ice. this is one of the narrow cases where pounds comes off the bench to say, "actually, you need weight" (icebreakers slide/ride up on top of the ice and the weight of the ship breaks breaks it ice downward)